[Peace-discuss] The Road Map

[David Green]

Who's afraid of the Road Map?
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 5 May 2003

Even before its publication, Israel's supporters in
the United States launched a vigorous campaign to
sabotage the U.S.-sponsored 'Road Map' for
Israeli-Palestinian peace. Nearly 400 members of the
U.S. House and Senate signed letters circulated by the
pro-Israeli lobby opposing the plan. 

Influential neoconservatives aligned with the Pentagon
have attacked the Road Map and the State Department
for promoting it. The pro-Israel lobby has always been
vigilant against any U.S. policy that could thwart
Israel's long-term expansionist plans in the occupied
Palestinian territories. But rhetoric against the Road
Map -- which is endorsed by the current president --
is the sharpest since the first President Bush delayed
U.S. loan guarantees to Israel in 1991.

Israel's supporters are in full panic by even the
appearance of minimal fairness and reciprocity
contained in the plan.

Yossi Klein Halevi, an Israeli analyst, claimed in The
Los Angeles Times that the Road Map is sloppy and
biased because it does not insist that Palestinians
eradicate all resistance to the occupation prior to
any Israeli measures. "The credibility of the Road
Map, " Halevi argues, requires the Palestinian
Authority to "uproot the terrorist infrastructure" as
a first step, "before Israel can be asked for a
reciprocal gesture" such as freezing settlements
(April 28). 

Halevi is infuriated that the Road Map contains a
timetable and contends that, "it will take years, not
months, to test the transformation of Palestinian
society." In other words, Halevi demands an open-ended
process in which Israel is allowed to continue its
killing, destruction and colonization for years, while
the only tangible feature of the 'peace process' in
the meantime would be complete Palestinian
capitulation to the occupation..

The Road Map's "greatest conceptual flaw," Halevi
argues, is "its relentless symmetry in apportioning
blame." He is bitter that it requires an end to
incitement by both sides, and he asserts that while
"the Palestinian Authority's incitement campaign
includes Holocaust denial and the dehumanization of
Jews," nothing "remotely comparable occurs in
mainstream Israel." Halevi ignores the fact that
Israel's government includes ministers whose parties
ran for office on platforms explicitly calling for
"transfer" of the Palestinians from their homeland --
a crime that fits the international legal definition
of genocide. Halevi displays an unusual level of
neurotic denial when he ends his screed with the
grotesque statement that Palestinians are living under
"a self-inflicted occupation." 

While Halevi accommodates the grim reality of the
occupation by blaming the Palestinians for it, the
Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman maintains that
the occupation (which he refers to always in quotation
marks) simply does not exist. For Foxman, the director
of the ubiquitous "anti-bigotry" organization that
explicitly refused to condemn Sharon's embrace of
pro-ethnic cleansing parties, the danger from the Road
Map is precisely that it focuses attention on the
occupation instead of red-herrings like constantly
escalating demands for internal Palestinian "reform."

Writing in the ultra-conservative New York Sun, Foxman
worries that according to the Road Map, "the core of
the problem is Israel's "occupation" of the
territories." Foxman understands correctly that, "once
Israel's occupation is seen as the heart of the
problem, what follows in the Road Map flows
inevitably" (April 14). The blame for such heretical
notions lies firmly with the Road Map's European,
Russian and UN co-sponsors according to Foxman, which
illustrates "the long-recognized danger of the
international community becoming the focal point of
Middle East diplomacy." Hence, the pro-Israel lobby
should do everything possible to keep 'peace making'
in the hands only of the United States, where it can
be kept under strict supervision, and continue to
focus attention on Palestinian shortcomings.

Robert Satloff, Director of Policy and Strategic
Planning at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy (WINEP), shares many of the same fears about
the Road Map. WINEP, the most influential pro-Israel
think-tank in Clinton's Washington, and the home base
of Oslo-era fixtures Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, has
been overshadowed in the Bush administration by
neoconservative groups. 

In his panic, Satloff has jettisoned the studied and
false affectation of even-handedness that is WINEP's
trademark. Borrowing neoconservative clothing, Satloff
rails that "any plan advocated by governments and
institutions that oppose virtually every aspect of
U.S. Mideast policy should be enough to make the Road
Map suspect," and demands more U.S. pressure for Arab
"democratization" (Newsday, April 29). Satloff ought
to be elated that the entire Arab League, the European
Union and Russia jointly endorse a U.S. plan for
Israel to have normal relations and peace with all its
neighbors, but now he tells us that international
support for the plan is actually a drawback. 

Satloff shares the horror of international involvement
and agrees that all the burden should be on the
Palestinians before Israel is required to act, but he
ingeniously extends this burden to the entire Arab
world. He calls on Washington to demand that the Arabs
"put flesh on their commitment to Israel that peace
with the Palestinians means peace will all Arabs."
This translates into immediate concrete gains for
Israel including "immediate steps to end anti-Semitic
incitement in state-run Arab media," -- code
effectively for the silencing of all criticism of
Israel. Satloff also demands that Arab states "restore
pre-Intifada trade and consular links and begin direct
public engagement with Israelis in Israel." 

Whatever hurdles the Palestinians overcome, Israel's
chorus in the United States is ready to instantly
present new ones. Against such stiff opposition, and
with the presidential election campaign fast
approaching, the chances that the divided Bush
administration will be willing or able to resist
organized Israeli obstructionism and implement the
Road Map are slim indeed.


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